Tuesday, May 26, 2015

J Dilla

THE CULT OF DILLA

June 16th 2009, The Guardianby Simon Reynolds

Record stores are dying in my neighbourhood, the
East Village of New York. The only ones that are hanging in there, even prospering,
belong to a particular type: boutiques that
offer a tidied-up version of the crate-digging experience, without the dust and
the graft, the knees-bent flicking through musty cardboard boxes in roach-infested
basements. Smart-looking and
well-organised, these stores have nice-looking racks made of unvarnished wood, while their
wares--funk and soul, bebop and fusion, soundtracks and library
music--tend to be selective and pricey. As well as selling source vinyl for the breaks and samples prized by deejays and
producers, these stores also stock vintage rap 12 inches and current
underground hip hop (always on vinyl, of course). Up by the counter, they'll
have copies of Wax Poetics on sale.

Several
years ago I was in one of these local shops, just about to clap headphones on
my head and sift through an armful of vinyl, when some wondrous music streamed
out of the store's sound system. All rippling ribbons of synth and quiet storm
diva murmuring and gasps, it was the most swooningly cosmic thing I'd heard in
a small eternity. As I headed down the aisle to the back of the store where the
deejay lurked, the thought popped into my head: "p'raps this is
Dilla?"

I don't
know why, really, since I only had a vague idea of who he was, having read
about his recent death and gleaned that he was this big deal cult
producer. J Dilla, a/k/a Jaydee, a/k/a James Dewitt Yancey, is someone
I had "slept on" (to use the American expression). To be honest, I avoid that whole
backpacker rap/Premier-is-God/Wax Poetics
area. (In fact I only go to these
crate-digger boutiques because they sometimes have Sixties and Seventies rock
and weird avant-garde stuff). I'm one of those who believe that the sector that
kept rap vital these last dozen years wasn't the underground but that cusp zone
between "the streets" and commercial mainstream: Cash Money, Ruff
Ryders, Ludacris, Lil Jon. Mostly Dirty South, in other words: hip hop that
isn't encumbered by crippling reverence towards its old skool past.
Still, sometimes as a critic you just absorb
a sense of the musical landscape through osmosis and sure enough when I asked
the deejay what record he was playing, he reluctantly (the attitude, typical
for this kind of store, seemed to be "if you need to ask, you're not
someone who needs to know") showed me the instrumentals version of Dilla's
posthumous album The Shining.

In the next week I got hold of as much Dilla as I
could: stuff he'd done with his group
Slum Village and in collaboration with Madlib, solo records like Donuts, Ruff
Draft, Welcome To Detroit, and, naturally The Shining (where I discovered that
the track that blew my mind in the store was called "Won't Do").

As a body of work, though, it seemed… variable. For
every "Won't Do" or similar gem like the halcyon summer-soul-breeze
"So Far To Go" (also on The
Shining) there'd be a bunch of backpacker-friendly beats with a languid MC
rapping on top. Still cultists love
fragmentary, scattered bodies of work, they enjoy nothing more than chasing
down obscure remixes and impossible-to-find mixtapes.

And sure enough, in the ensuing years, the
cult of Dilla has grown ever bigger. An entire wave of music has come through
influenced by his trademark style, the most prominent exponents being Flying
Lotus, a/k/a Californian experimental hip hop producer Steven Ellison, who
recorded the Dilla homage "Fall In Love", and SA-RA
Creative Partners, who collaborated with Dilla on the track
"Thrilla" and whose splendid new album Nuclear Evolution: The Age of
Love is out soon.

There's also a
burgeoning micro-industry of posthumous product. Rapster/!K7 have issued two Dillanthology
compilations of his productions and remixes for other artists, the second of
which is out this month. As is the all-new album Jay Stay Paid, a selection of basement tapes sequenced and spruced up by his mother Maureen Yancey with help from Dilla's hero Pete Rock (like Premier,
one of those cult producers that
underground rap types drool over). As
far as I can tell, Jay Stay Paid is the first time that a hip hop beat-maker
has gotten the kind of life-after-death treatment afforded superstar rappers
like Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. You even get people wearing T-shirts that
say "J Dilla Changed My Life".

So what made Dilla special? If you could break his style down into three
main components, they'd be his way with a vocal sample, his way with a beat,
and his way with synths.

As an example
of the first, let's look at a really old track that's on the first volume of
Dillanthology: "The Light" by
Common. I loved this when it came out in 2000 but I'd never realized that Dilla
produced it until I got Dillanthology.
"The Light" is pretty much the only Common tune I've ever cared
for and such was my antipathy to the rapper that for a long while I considered
the track a kind of sample-delivery machine: you wait patiently through the
verses for the gorgeous, glistening chorus, which is derived from "Open
Your Eyes" by Bobby Caldwell, a white-but-sounds-black singer who hit big in
early Eighties America with a similar "rock 'n' soul" sound to Hall
& Oates.

If you compare the original
song (and do check out Caldwell's hat while you're about
it) with "The Light" you can
clearly see Dilla's artistry: he's taken
an already lovely, if slightly schmaltzy song and created another song out of
it. "Open Your Eyes" is a guy
telling a woman to stop pining for her lost lover, because what she needs is
right here in front of her. Combining different bits of the chorus into a new
chorus, Dilla extracts from the original song a more mystical statement about L.O.V.E.
that fits Common's lyric (which I grew to find, um, touching) like a
glove. The most extraordinary,
steal-your-breath part of "The Light" comes at the end where Dilla
takes vocal fragments from various points in the song--a line here, a curl of
grace notes there-- and weaves them into what sounds like a stretch of
spontaneous soul-singer extemporizing. It's as though Caldwell is right there
in the studio with Dilla and Common, scatting over the beat.

Talking of beats: Dilla's signature, widely forged
at the moment, is what tech-heads call unquantized drums. Quantization is a procedure that makes
rhythms perfectly regular, grooves superhumanly tight. The gist of what Dilla did (and I invite comments
box experts to fill in the gaps in excruciating technical detail) is to avoid quantizing
and go for a looser, human feel, fitful and fallible, sometimes pushing
"off-beat" to the edge of plain wrong. Hip hop headz talk of Dilla as the catalyst
for "the return of the boom-bap" , a
phrase originally from KRS-One's 1993 album "Return of the Boom Bap" .

Sometimes rendered boom-boom-bap, it's a phonetic
evocation of hip hop's classic drum pattern.
The booms are the kicks, the bap is the snare, and the combination is
that loping midtempo groove that tugs at your neck and your head, not so much at
your hips or your feet. As it has
developed in underground rap circles these past fifteen years, boom-bap has
come to refer to hip hop for nodders and smokers. To backpackers it's the very pulse of life
itself, but to these ears, boom-bap strikes me as being as capable of being blandly
formulaic as any other kind of beat.
Dilla did his fair share of perfunctorily functional grooves but at his
most creative he deconstructed the rhythm, placing the booms and baps, hi hats
and claps, in an off relationship to each other, clustered too close or coming
in too late, but always retaining a ghostly relationship to hip hop feel.

And finally the synths, which burble and twitter
through a lot of Dilla tracks (see "On Stilts," "Spacecowboy vs. Bobble Head" and "Dilla Bot Vs. The Hybrid," highlights of Jay Stay Paid) , although it's
often hard to tell if they are sampled off some obscure record or played on a
vintage analog keyboard. Even more than
the cut-up "vocal science" and the stumbling beats, this is one of
the most widely imitated aspects of Dilla's style, especially within that
amorphous genre-not-genre known as Wonky.
A musician friend of mine, Matthew Ingram (check out his debut album as
Woebot )
tells me this has a lot to do with the rise of "soft synths," which
have been embraced by producers in lots of different genres. Simplifying the technicalities, what this
means is that producers can have the virtual equivalent of an analogue
synthesizer inside their digital audio workstations. This enables them to simulate the hands-on
fun of knob-twiddling and moving sliders that you get with an antique synthesiser
and which generates all those supercool retro-futurist wibbles and wooshes. "Soft synths aren’t always emulations of
analogue synths," says Ingram. "But analog synth emulators are
increasingly popular at the moment."
And they're one reason Dilla is such a spectral (omni)presence across
the left-field music landscape of the late Noughties.